This album has now been released with the label Passacaille and is available for purchase or streaming.
In January 2023, I recorded my first solo album with Christophe Gauthier and Luc Beauséjour. This album focuses on Italian music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the concept of tears as a sort of idée fixe. Tears of sorrow, of joy, of penance, of self-pity; pious tears, passionate tears, tears of longing, of betrayal; tears shed for God; because “faith is dead” or “Love no longer loves”; tears as one’s only sustenance, or as a sole refuge of solace. Tears of death, and of life. In their treatment of these themes, the works of Italian composers Barbara Strozzi, Francesca Caccini, Sigismondo d’India, Giovanni Battista Bovicelli, Lodovico Viadana, Giovanni Bassano and Bartolomeo Barbarino use extremely colourful word-painting and encourage and require an extreme level of subtlety and variation in sound colours, articulations and shading, and are a perfect conduit for exploring the vocal virtuosity of the baroque trombone.
In addition to these vocal monodies and pieces of diminutions, this album also features three of my own original compositions, including an 8-minute sonata for trombone solo and basso continuo inspired by the sonatas of Biagio Marini and Dario Castello and the harmonies of D’India and Strozzi, using the musical language of Italian composers circa 1630 while treating the trombone in a manner consistent with the quasi-vocal idiom found in its existing soloistic repertoire.
Maximilien Brisson 